Iceland has enriched world literature with two principal contributions: the
sagas, ancient histories of heroes, in which reality meshes with fiction, and
Scandinavian mythology. There is no doubt that the Icelandic poets were the
first to write these sagas and histories. The earliest Icelandic literary
manifestations were written by bards who, already in the beginning of the tenth century, recited poetry in the Scandinavian courts. The oldest written
sagas date to the thirteenth century, even though it is commonly accepted that
collected histories date even earlier. In Iceland between the fourteenth and the
sixteenth centuries, translations of a religious nature, for example works
dealing with the lives of the saints and especially translations into Latin of the
Bible, abound. It would not be until the seventeenth century that scholars
would begin to reexamine both Icelandic folklore and erudite works primarily
written in Latin.

In Iceland there has always been an interest in poetry and the sagas, which
then explains the survival of the Icelandic language since the time of the
Norwegian Viking colonization of the island at the end of the nineteenth
century. In addition to this internally focused literary interest, and with the
exception of the role played by the church, geographic isolation has outlined
the most distinctive characteristics of this narrative relatively untouched by
exterior influences. Considering this, then, it is not surprising that the
romantic movement was received in Iceland with moderation, if it is even true
that the Icelandic writers emphasized language purity without going to the
extreme of adopting a blind glorification of the past. Consequently, there was
no clear confrontation between the Age of Reason and Romanticism in Iceland. Realism, then, arrived in Iceland with the magazine Verd+̴andi ( 1882). Gestur Pálsson ( 1852-1921), a journalist who graduated from the University
of Copenhagen and who was influenced by the Danish critic Georg Brandes,

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